With the specter of populism looming over a critical election year in Europe, the European Parliament has taken an unusual step to crack down on racism and hate speech in its own house.

In an unprecedented move, lawmakers have granted special powers to the president to pull the plug on live broadcasts of parliamentary debate in cases of racist speech or acts and the ability to purge any offending video or audio material from the system.

Trouble is, the rules on what is considered offensive are none too clear. Some are concerned about manipulation. Others are crying censorship.

"This undermines the reliability of the Parliament's archives at a moment where the suspicion of 'fake news' and manipulation threatens the credibility of the media and the politicians," said Tom Weingaertner, president of the Brussels-based International Press Association.

After Britain's decision to leave the European Union, the rising popularity of anti-immigrant candidates like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or far-right Marine Le Pen in France is worrying Europe's political mainstream. Le Pen, who is running for the French presidency this spring, has promised to follow Britain's lead.

At the European Parliament, where elections are due in 2019, many say the need for action against hate speech, and strong sanctions for offenders, is long overdue.
The assembly— with its two seats; one in the Belgian capital of Brussels, and the other in Strasbourg in northeast France — is often the stage for political and sometimes nationalist theater. Beyond routine shouting matches, members occasionally wear T-shirts splashed with slogans or unfurl banners. Flags adorn some lawmakers' desks.
Yet more and more in recent years, lawmakers have gone too far.

"There have been a growing number of cases of politicians saying things that are beyond the pale of normal parliamentary discussion and debate," said British EU parliamentarian Richard Corbett, who chaperoned the new rule through the assembly.
"What if this became not isolated incidents, but specific, where people could say: 'Hey, this is a fantastic platform. It's broad, it's live-streamed. It can be recorded and repeated. Let's use it for something more vociferous, more spectacular,'" he told The Associated Press.

In a nutshell, rule 165 of the parliament's rules of procedure allows the chair of debates to halt the live broadcast "in the case of defamatory, racist or xenophobic language or behavior by a member." The maximum fine for offenders would be around 9,000 euros ($9,500).

Under the rule, not made public by the assembly but first reported by Spain's La Vanguardia newspaper, offending material could be "deleted from the audiovisual record of proceedings," meaning citizens would never know it happened unless reporters were in the room. Weingaertner said the IPA was never consulted on that.

A technical note seen by the AP outlines a procedure for manually cutting off the video feed, stopping transmission on in-house TV monitors and breaking the satellite link to halt broadcast to the outside world. A videotape in four languages would be kept running to serve as a legal record during the blackout. A more effective and permanent system was being sought.

It is also technically possible to introduce a safe-guard time delay so broadcasts appear a few seconds later. This means they could be interrupted before offending material is aired.

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comments:

Nick Griffin’s 2014 speech to the European Parliament is still on the parliament’s website but, given its not-so-veiled attack on Jews, how much longer can it survive? To some, this is ‘racism and hate speech’. To others, it’s the glorious truth:

‘Mr President, when the godfather of the European Union, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, published the plan for a united Europe and the ethnocide of the peoples of Europe, the encouragement of mass non-white immigration was central to the plot. Since then, an unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists has schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation with the deliberate aim of breeding us out of existence in our homelands.

‘As indigenous resistance to this human genetic-modification industry grows, the criminal elite seeks new ways to camouflage their project. First, their immigrant pawns were temporary guest workers; then it was a multiracial experiment; then they were refugees, and then the answer to a shrinking population. Different excuses, different lies—and asylum is just another one. But the real aim stays the same: the biggest genocide in human history, the final solution to the Christian European problem. This crime demands a new set of Nuremberg trials, and you people will be in the dock.’

It is the truth about judaism as an ideology which concerns them most. The EU and so many other organisations, such as the UN and all those thousands of 'race' NGOs, have their foundational support and also the 'holocaust' acts as a repressant whenever the issue of cultural, ethnic and literal genocide of Europeans is broached. In the age of the internet, where people can read different opinions and facts never mentioned in the lying media, the falsity of so much is now being exposed and the kakistocracy in power is worried that its iron grip will not last without some very real physical genocide which would likely bring on revolution against them. We live in interesting times.

“Holocaust denial and other forms of hate speech indisputably nurture prejudice and hate crimes,” he continued. “Open discussion of ideas is certainly essential to pluralistic and democratic systems, but facilitating the spread of such hate-filled ideas is irresponsible, to say the least. As a major agent for the dissemination of ideas, it is incumbent upon Amazon, as it is also incumbent upon Internet providers in general, to act to curb the spread of hatred.”

“It’s not only Amazon, and there are a lot of forces trying to get this hatred removed or marginalized,” Rozett told the Post, also noting that in countries where Holocaust denial is illegal, such books are not available on Amazon. In the US, however, they are still freely available.

“There’s a civic responsibility,” he stressed. “These are very big giants of information.”

He said that while he would ultimately like the store to entirely remove such content from its website, he offered secondary solutions such as clearly marking the nature of the books.http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Amazon-is-asked-to-stop-selling-books-on-Holocaust-denial-482349

Having made such a carry-on over supposed nazi burning of books, jews cannot be seen actually doing so themselves, or (yet) encouraging others to do so and the field is so huge now as more and more people realise that it is judaism as well as its contention of a holocaust which underpins so many of the ills of Western societies, that the only way for them is to keep banging on about 'hate speech' which is why we need to state judaism's own ideology and how that aptly mirrors what they accuse others of. Also, we need to expose lashon hara far more, so that people come to know that 'political correctness' (part of the jewish-led School of Cultural Marxism in Frankfurt before the National Socialists closed it down and its members, almost all jews, fled to US, especially Columbia and Princeton universities) originates in judaic halakah (jewish law) which contends that even if something is the truth, it must neither be spoken, heard or even thought of if, in so doing, it would cause pain, suffering or damage to the community. Quite a bit of 'political correctness' and 'hate speech' laws make sense, in a contorted way, once one knows their origin and the intentions behind it, as well as acknowleding that most forms of communication (print, television, film studios, radio, social media, search engines, etc) are owned by the jews. They want total power and total control, in order to 'fix' or 'repair' the world to suit their interests (known as 'tikkun olam', a phrase I first encountered on a 'counter-jihad' site, GoV, often used by a favourite commenter, a jew who presented himself as a Christian, Takyan Seiko).